IRELAND
Irish Independent
Maeve Sheehan
PUBLISHED
10/07/2016
[Commission of Investigation Report into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin July 2009; released November 26, 2009 – BishopAccountability.org]
Last Monday, one of the worst offending priests named in the Murphy Report on clerical child abuse was found guilty of raping a boy with a crucifix.
Fr Tony Walsh, known as the singing priest, will be sentenced for his crimes later this month. During his trial, the court heard he already has 17 previous convictions for indecently assaulting a number of young boys and one girl.
Fr Walsh started out his priestly life in the west Dublin parish of Ballyfermot, then a growing suburb which was plagued by a succession of paedophiles from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Their time in the burgeoning suburb overlapped with that of another paedophile, Eamon Cooke, who lured the children of the area into the studios of his pirate radio station, Radio Dublin, down the road in Inchicore. Days after he died, he was named as the prime suspect for the killing of the missing schoolboy Philip Cairns, who disappeared on his way back to school in 1984.
In her report on clerical sex abuse in the Dublin archdiocese, which was published in 2009, Judge Yvonne Murphy found “worrying connections” between some paedophile priests, including Fr Walsh and another paedophile, Fr Bill Carney, both of whom spent their formative years in Ballyfermot. However, she found no evidence that they were part of a “paedophile ring”.
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